Under Fire, Henri Barbusse [free novel reading sites TXT] 📗

were—there were—there are a hundred thousand more of them,” Volpatte at last concluded in confusion.

But the men who were paying for the safety of the others with their strength and their lives enjoyed the wrath that choked him, that brought him to bay in his corner, and overwhelmed him with the apparitions of shirkers.

“Lucky he doesn’t start talking about the factory hands who’ve served their apprenticeship in the war, and all those who’ve stayed at home under the excuse of National Defense, that was put on its feet in five secs!” murmured Tirette; “he’d keep us going with them till Doomsday.”

“You say there are a hundred thousand of them, flea-bite,” chaffed Barque. “Well, in 1914—do you hear me?—Millerand, the War Minister, said to the M.P.‘s, ‘There are no shirkers.’”

“Millerand!” growled Volpatte. “I tell you, I don’t know the man; but if he said that, he’s a dirty sloven, sure enough!”

*

“One is always,” said Bertrand, “a shirker to some one else.”

“That’s true; no matter what you call yourself, you’ll always—always—find worse blackguards and better blackguards than yourself.”

“All those that never go up to the trenches, or those who never go into the first line, and even those who only go there now and then, they’re shirkers, if you like to call ‘em so, and you’d see how many there are if they only gave stripes to the real fighters.”

“There are two hundred and fifty to each regiment of two battalions,” said Cocon.

“There are the orderlies, and a bit since there were even the servants of the adjutants.”—“The cooks and the under-cooks.”—“The sergeant-majors, and the quartermaster-sergeants, as often as not.”—“The mess corporals and the mess fatigues.”—“Some office-props and the guard of the colors.”—“The baggage-masters.” “The drivers, the laborers, and all the section, with all its non-coms., and even the sappers.”—“The cyclists.” “Not all of them.”—“Nearly all the Red Cross service.”—“Not the stretcher-bearers, of course; for they’ve not only got a devilish rotten job, but they live with the companies, and when attacks are on they charge with their stretchers; but the hospital attendants.”

“Nearly all parsons, especially at the rear. For, you know, parsons with knapsacks on, I haven’t seen a devil of a lot of ‘em, have you?”

“Nor me either. In the papers, but not here.”

“There are some, it seems.”—“Ah!”

“Anyway, the common soldier’s taken something on in this war.”

“There are others that are in the open. We’re not the only ones.”

“We are!” said Tulacque, sharply; “we’re almost the only ones!”

He added, “You may say—I know well enough what you’ll tell me—that it was the motor lorries and the heavy artillery that brought it off at Verdun. It’s true, but they’ve got a soft job all the same by the side of us. We’re always in danger, against their once, and we’ve got the bullets and the bombs, too, that they haven’t. The heavy artillery reared rabbits near their dug-outs, and they’ve been making themselves omelettes for eighteen months. We are really in danger. Those that only get a bit of it, or only once, aren’t in it at all. Otherwise, everybody would be. The nursemaid strolling the streets of Paris would be, too, since there are the Taubes and the Zeppelins, as that pudding-head said that the pal was talking about just now.”

“In the first expedition to the Dardanelles, there was actually a chemist wounded by a shell. You don’t believe me, but it’s true all the same—an officer with green facings, wounded!”

“That’s chance, as I wrote to Mangouste, driver of a remount horse for the section, that got wounded—but it was done by a motor lorry.”

“That’s it, it’s like that. After all, a bomb can tumble down on a pavement, in Paris or in Bordeaux.”

“Oui, oui; so it’s too easy to say, ‘Don’t let’s make distinctions in danger!’ Wait a bit. Since the beginning, there are some of those others who’ve got killed by an unlucky chance; among us there are some that are still alive by a lucky chance. It isn’t the same thing, that, seeing that when you’re dead, it’s for a long time.”

“Yes,” says Tirette, “but you’re getting too venomous with your stories of shirkers. As long as we can’t help it, it’s time to turn over. I’m thinking of a retired forest-ranger at Cherey, where we were last month, who went about the streets of the town spying everywhere to rout out some civilian of military age, and he smelled out the dodgers like a mastiff. Behold him pulling up in front of a sturdy goodwife that had a mustache, and he only sees her mustache, so he bullyrags her—‘Why aren’t you at the front, you?’”

“For my part,” says Pepin, “I don’t fret myself about the shirkers or the semi-shirkers, it’s wasting one’s time; but where they get on my nerves, it’s when they swank. I’m of Volpatte’s opinion. Let ‘em shirk, good, that’s human nature; but afterwards they shouldn’t say, ‘I’ve been a soldier.’ Take the engages, [note 3] for instance—”

“That depends on the engages. Those who have offered for the infantry without conditions, I look up to those men as much as to those that have got killed; but the engages in the departments or special arms, even in the heavy artillery, they begin to get my back up. We know ‘em! When they’re doing the agreeable in their social circle, they’ll say, ‘I’ve offered for the war.’—‘Ah, what a fine thing you have done; of your own free will you have defied the machine-guns! ‘—‘Well, yes, madame la marquise, I’m built like that!’ Eh, get out of it, humbug!”

“Oui, it’s always the same tale. They wouldn’t be able to say in the drawing-rooms afterwards, ‘Tenez, here I am; look at me for a voluntary engage!’”

“I know a gentleman who enlisted in the aerodromes. He had a fine uniform—he’d have done better to offer for the Opera-Comique. What am I saying—‘he’d have done better?’ He’d have done a damn sight better, oui. At least he’d have made other people laugh honestly, instead of making them laugh with the spleen in it.”

“They’re a lot of cheap china, fresh painted, and plastered with ornaments and all sorts of falderals, but they don’t go under fire.”

“If there’d only been people like those, the Boches would be at Bayonne.”

“When war’s on, one must risk his skin, eh, corporal?”

“Yes,” said Bertrand, “there are some times when duty and danger are exactly the same thing; when the country, when justice and liberty are in danger, it isn’t in taking shelter that you defend them. On the contrary, war means danger of death and sacrifice of life for everybody, for everybody; no one is sacred. One must go for it, upright, right to the end, and not pretend to do it in a fanciful uniform. These services at the bases, and they’re necessary, must be automatically guaranteed by the really weak and the really old.”

“Besides, there are too many rich and influential people who have shouted, ‘Let us save France!—and begin by saving ourselves!’ On the declaration of war, there was a big rush to get out of it, that’s what there was, and the strongest succeeded. I noticed myself, in my little corner, it was especially those that jawed most about patriotism previously. Anyway, as the others were saying just now, if they get into a funk-hole, the worst filthiness they can do is to make people believe they’ve run risks. ‘Cos those that have really run risks, they deserve the same respect as the dead.”

“Well, what then? It’s always like that, old man; you can’t change human nature.”

“It can’t be helped. Grouse, complain? Tiens! talking about complaining, did you know Margoulin?”

“Margoulin? The good sort that was with us, that they left to die at le Crassier because they thought he was dead?”

“Well, he wanted to make a complaint. Every day he talked about protesting against all those things to the captain and the commandant. He’d say after breakfast, ‘I’ll go and say it as sure as that pint of wine’s there.’ And a minute later, ‘If I don’t speak, there’s never a pint of wine there at all.’ And if you were passing later you’d hear him again, ‘Tiens! is that a pint of wine there? Well, you’ll see if I don’t speak! Result—he said nothing at all. You’ll say, ‘But he got killed.’ True, but previously he had God’s own time to do it two thousand times if he’d dared.”

“All that, it makes me ill,” growled Blaire, sullen, but with a flash of fury.

“We others, we’ve seen nothing—seeing that we don’t see anything—but if we did see—!”

“Old chap,” Volpatte cried, “those depots—take notice of what I say—you’d have to turn the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone and the Loire into them to clean them. In the interval, they’re living, and they live well, and they go to doze peacefully every night, every night!”

The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they would pass it—cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws showed in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn into the sky.

Bitterly said Cocon: “All that, it doesn’t give you any desire to die.”

“Yes, it does,” some one replies tranquilly. “Yes, it does. Don’t exaggerate, old kipper-skin.”

[note 1:] Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.—Tr.

[note 2:] A-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the duration of service at the front.—Tr.

[note 3:] Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three. four, or five years. Those enlisted for four or five year’ have the right to choose their arm of the service, subject to conditions.—

10

Argoval

THE twilight of evening was coming near from the direction of the country, and a gentle breeze, soft as a whisper, came with it.

In the houses alongside this rural way—a main road, garbed for a few paces like a main street—the rooms whose pallid windows no longer fed them with the limpidity of space found their own light from lamps and candles, so that the evening left them and went outside, and one saw light and darkness gradually changing places.

On the edge of the village, towards the fields, some unladen soldiers were wandering, facing the breeze. We were ending the day in peace, and enjoying that idle ease whose happiness one only realizes when one is really weary. It was fine weather, we were at the beginning of rest, and dreaming about it. Evening seemed to make our faces bigger before it darkened them, and they shone with the serenity of nature.

Sergeant Suilhard came to me, took my arm, and led me away. “Come,” he said, “and I’ll show you something.”

The approaches to the village abounded in rows of tall and tranquil trees, and we followed them along. Under the pressure of the breeze their vast verdure yielded from time to time in slow majestic movements.

Suilhard went in front of me. He led me into a deep lane, which twisted about between high banks; and on each side grew a border of bushes, whose tops met each other. For some moments we walked in a bower of tender green. A last gleam of light, falling aslant across the lane, made points of bright yellow among the foliage, and round as gold coins. “This is pretty,” I said.

He said nothing, but looked aside and hard. Then he stopped. “It must be there.”

He made me climb